Oliver Knussen (b.1952) is a major and distinctive figure on the international
musical landscape both as conductor and as composer. He is a constant across
the performance of these three works by fellow traveller, Alexander Goehr.
One rarely gets to confirm this but I would expect that what we hear is informed
by a fellow composer’s sensitivity to the trust that a creator must repose
in the person who conducts newly- minted music.

Berlin-born Alexander Goehr is the son of the conductor and composer
Walter Goehr. Walter made recordings of the Tippett
Double Concerto, of Bach
and later with Mewton-Wood
in warhorse concertos. Alexander was brought to England in the early 1930s.
His studies were at the Royal Manchester College of Music with Richard Hall
alongside Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies and John Ogdon. Later he was a student
of Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod.

Goehr’s music is full of lapidary detail and in the case of When Adam
Fell has an impressionistic patina – a sort of dissonant Ravel but always
with a sense of line and continuity. His music is not immune to romantic emotion.
When Adam Fell was composed for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and is
dedicated “to Ollie again”. The musing and finely calculated dissonance of
When Adam Fell can be discerned only darkly in the Pastorals.
This was a South West German Radio, Baden-Baden commission from almost half
a century before When Adam Fell. It was premièred at Donaueschingen
and conducted by Ernest Bour. Contrary to the implications some may take from
the title this work was influenced by the composer’s work on incidental music
for Oedipus Rex and Oedipus Coloneus. It’s a tougher and
more abrasively forbidding listen than When Adam Fell although the
same attention to fine instrumental detail is on show. It’s what you might
expect of a work of the rough and tumble 1960s. Do not expect a rustic idyll.

Marching to Carcassonne is in nine separately tracked sections. This
is an aural delight with Goehr’s proclivity for filigree assertively to the
fore. There is real transparency here and even when the moods are wan and
misty the instrumental detail leaps out at you. It is after all a Serenade
for piano and 12 instruments. Peter Serkin is a prominent part of this chamber
ensemble work that leans more toward magical incident than to large-scale
orchestral awe. The little March that keeps reappearing has a determination
and sense of purpose. That march opens the work and is written for two horns
and string quartet. It recurs as the fifth and eighth movements and appears
six times in the course of the long ninth movement final section (…marching
to Carcassonne, Labyrinth). At each appearance it is precisely half as
long as it had been in its previous version. The impressionistic tendencies
of Night (VIII) again underline the milky dissonance of When
Adam Fell. It was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and the Serge
Koussevitzky Music Foundation and is dedicated to the memory of Serge and
Natalie Koussevitzky.

The exemplary liner note is by the composer with a thoughtful complementary
essay by Ivan Hewett.

This CD adds invaluably to the far from overcrowded Goehr discography which
also includes discs from Lyrita
and NMC.Rob Barnett

A milky dissonance yet with a sense of line and continuity. Finely calculated
performances.